Guns, goons, and the waterfront priest: Remaking Manila's anti-communist docks in 1950

Abstract

This article examines how early Cold War anti-communism transformed labor processes at the Port of Manila. In 1950 the threat of communism at the city's port gained the attention of the highest reaches of the US State Department. Shifting diplomatic discourses and a changing Cold War map imbued new meaning into trade union racketeering and Filipino dockworkers who were, it was dubiously argued, on the verge of joining the country's communists. Through archival analysis of diplomatic dispatches, intelligence reports, and newspaper sources, this article examines a series of spectacular events and covert political diplomacy. In particular it explains how an American Jesuit priest in Manila earned the trust of the State Department and played an outsized role in remaking pier-side labor politics. As concern grew in Washington, American diplomats covertly intervened to back the priest. In detailing how the piers staged global geopolitics, the article also situates these affairs in local political contexts to argue for a more nuanced understanding of anti-communism in Southeast Asia. Filipino trade union leaders and government officials colluded with but also subverted and remade American discourses and diplomacy to their own political and economic advantage.